Coffee heat rising

Idle essays

Gimme that ole-time real food…

by

The other day when I was over at M’hijito’s house, he served up a couple of artichokes with some Trader Joe’s organic mayonnaise. Out of curiosity, I read the label. And to my amazement: no sugar!

Hallelujah! Next time I was in the vicinity of TJ’s, I ran in and bought a jar for myself. It’s the first time in years I’ve seen real mayonnaise come out of a bottle. And the flavor? Exactly like mayo used to taste, back in the Pleistocene when men were men, dinosaurs were dinosaurs, and food was really food.

Yeah. I know. Best Foods—Hellman’s in the East—claims to dish up “real mayonnaise.” And once they did make real mayo. But…read the label. It’s full of sugar. Has been for decades; even more so since 2006, when they changed the recipe.

What happened was Miracle Whip. This vile concoction, a hangover from the Great Depression, was peddled during the 1950s with a great flurry of publicity and perky new-fangled TV advertising. Yum yum! I remember the girlish excitement around the stuff. All of a sudden, everyone was dolloping it onto their Jell-O salads. Next thing you knew, you couldn’t find a sandwich with a schmear of genuine mayonnaise on it. Everyone wanted the sweet, gunky Miracle Whip. To compete, Best Foods was forced to sweeten its own mayonnaise. That’s my theory, anyway.

Mayo is supposed to be a savory condiment, not sweet goop.

Consequently, I haven’t bought mayo in years. If I need it, I make it. But it’s a hassle, so most of the time I do without. So I was pleased to find some real mayo in a jar.

What is it about Corporate Foodarama that it’s so determined to cram sugar down our throats? Have you noticed how many things that aren’t sweet and aren’t supposed to be sweet are doped with sugar or corn syrup? Things like rye bread, for example. Rye bread doesn’t need sugar to rise, and it doesn’t need sugar to taste like rye bread. There’s absolutely zero point in dosing a loaf of rye bread with high-fructose corn syrup.

The other day, preparatory to starting back on Atkins, I bought a package of tasty-looking bratwurst at Costco. Naively, I failed to read the ingredients until after I got home and busted open the plastic wrap, tossed a couple in a frying pan, and watched caramel form on the bottom of the hot pan as the brats cooked. Grab the package, read. Less than halfway down the list: corn syrup. So all those things had to go into the freezer until after the ten pounds are gone from the belly.

Corn syrup. In the brats. Eeeew! Why??? Brats don’t contain sugar. Or honey. Or corn syrup. What makes them taste sweetish is mace, allspice, and marjoram. Actually, the predominant flavor in Costco’s brats was salt. Lots of salt.

Are we really so divorced from our food that we don’t even know what food is supposed to taste like? Does Big Food really have to dose every bite we eat with sugar to get us to swallow it? Well…probably, given what’s in some of that stuff.

I was entertained to discover this morning that my fellow food cranks and I have made the Big Time: Nicholas Kristof reports that the President’s Cancer Panel, “the Mount Everest of the medical mainstream,” is about to issue a report urging Americans to seek out organic foods and avoid the pollutants that are ubiquitous in everything we eat and drink. Contemplating the 300 chemicals that have been found in the umbilical cord blood of newborn infants, the panel’s members remark that “to a disturbing extent, babies are born pre-polluted.”

No kidding?

The panel recommends that you and I practice caution about what we ingest and rub on our skin. They suggest filtering water and storing it in glass, not plastic, containers; buying organic foods when possible; avoiding meats that are cooked well-done; and checking radon levels in our homes.

Okay, we don’t eat radon.

But we do eat sugar. To my mind it’s just one of a whole passel of undesirable chemicals that pollute our food and our beverages.

What a Day!

by

Endless. It’s ten to eleven, and I’m finally coming in for a landing.

• Up at 5:30: take the dog for an hour-long walk.
• Feed dog.
• Feed human, along the way cooking a bunch of sugary bratwursts to store in the freezer.
• Water plants.
• Write blog post.
• Upload completed grade rubrics and comments to BlackBoard (online course software).
• Enter grades for Eng. 101 portfolios in BlackBoard; mark attendance.
• Figure out which Eng. 102 students’ grades will be changed if they score high on the final paper; prioritize these in rushed last-minute grading frenzy.
• Realize this scheme will not work.
• Write a blog post.
• Calculate, record, and store 101 students’ grades, so they can be entered in the District’s online grading system quickly on Monday.
• Start the laundry.
• Read the client’s urgently needed copy.
• Wash the dog after brain goes numb reading technical copy.
• Read more of the client’s urgently needed copy.
• Call the mechanic to make appointment for oil change; leave word on his machine.
• Edit and reformat client’s complicated, highly technical table, the first of many to come.

Stopped around 5:30, truly brain-paralyzed after having sent the edited copy and table back to Author. At that point I decided I’d better wash the car before the sun goes down. This was a nice break—washing the van is easier than one would think, and now I’ll be able to see through the windshield again. It’s been a while since the road and I have caught sight of each other.

It occurred to me why it is that posting grades and all other activities that involve use of the Internet seem to take so damned long: one thing leads to another. No such task is ever straightforward and simple. Working with computers and the Net is a convoluted process.

Today, for example, two English 101 classmates, brothers who are both “A” students, dropped off the roster. Check the District’s system: they’ve been dropped for nonpayment of fees.

Say what? The college drops them for nonpayment of tuition three days before the final exam????

This eventuates a flurry of e-mails to the department, whose avatars know nothing, and then to the kids. Before long, a flurry of incoming e-mails hits: an outsourced contractor has screwed up an accounting update and accidentally expelled something over 400 students. They’re working on it. They promise they’re working on it!!! Please, please, please don’t send your students to Admissions and Records!

Dropping the brothers—plus a young woman from one of the 102 sections—causes BlackBoard to erase the entire semester’s grading record for the three students. It’s been a couple of weeks (mmmm…maybe more…) since I downloaded a BlackBoard backup, so if the morons don’t get this fixed by next Monday, and we do mean completely fixed, I am screwed.

At any rate…this is how entering 20 grades and 20 attendance points morphed into a two-hour adventure.

Moving on:

• Wash car.
• Discover dryer is dangerously hot. Haul blanket and towels to clothesline.
• Squirt dryer with water from spray bottle to jump-start cool-down process.
• Google “overheated electric dryer” to try to figure out what might be wrong with the thing.
• Examine vents; see nothing wrong with them.
• Brush and comb still damp dog.
• Start dinner: set artichokes to cook.
• Feed dog.
• Figure out where on earth the money is going to come from to pay the $1,089.60 owed for Medigap insurance.
• Calculate out a year and a half in advance to be sure removal of $1,089.60 from tax & insurance account will not break the bank.
• Finish fixing dinner.
• Write a blog post while food is cooking.
• Eat dinner.
• Clean up kitchen.
• Finish, proofread, and publish blog post.
• Take dog for walk.
• Write this blog post.

And so, to bed… there to copyedit the other client’s latest crime novel before falling asleep.

Health and Dollars: A challenge

by

Over at A Gai Shan Life, proprietor Revanche notes that Fabulous Financials‘ Single Ma is ramping up her dieting and exercise program in honor of National Fitness Month. In addition to all her other health and wealth strategies (she’s already lost 32 pounds!), she’s signing up for the Susan G. Komen 5K Race for the Cure, her first marathon. Revanche announces that she will “pace” Single Ma, but in dollars rather than kilometers: she’s set herself a challenge to save $5,000 between May 2 and June 5.

Holy mackerel, what ambitious women!

Well, not in honor of much but because I see I now officially look like a potato sack tied in the middle, I’m willing to join the challenge, but in a much lower-key way.

About a week or ten days ago I decided I need to lose about ten to fifteen pounds. And more to the point, I need to get enough exercise to tone up the belly, which is beginning to look pretty paunchy. A little earlier than this, I’d decided to get off all forms of caffeine, since the episodes of heart palpitations and light-headedness had come back in a busy swarm. The taste for high-test coffee does get out of control every now and again. 😉

Since I was kicking caffeine (it worked, BTW: the anxiety attack-like episodes immediately disappeared), I considered going back on the Atkins Diet, which worked effectively five years ago, when I lost 20 pounds or so in under three months. The weight stayed off for about a year, until I started drinking beer and wine again and, about the same time, succumbed to my lifelong love for pasta. As soon as the job pressures drove me back to indulging my favorite sins, I quickly bloated right back up to where I was before. {sigh}

This time I’d like to drop a more reasonable 10 pounds, which would take me down to a weight I consider more normal for a woman my age, who after all will never be her sylph-like self again. On reflection, Atkins is pretty extreme—reviewing the chapters on gearing up reminded me that I really don’t want to be gulping vitamins or, for that matter, weighing the amount of lettuce I eat every day.

So instead I decided to revert to a kind of ur-Atkins that my father used to invoke, way back in the 1950s and 60s, when he wanted to lose a few pounds: cut out all the alcohol, avoid sugar, and never touch any bread, rice, potatoes, or pasta.

This experiment started on the 24th; ten days later I’ve already lost three or four pounds (depending on the time of day). This weekend I wore a black J. Jill skirt purchased in the recent spending spree. In the store it fit just all right, but it tended to ride up on the paunch, climbing toward the rib cage. Saturday evening it actually fit around my waist properly—and stayed there! It looks a lot better.

Three of the new dresses have empire lines or fall unshaped from the shoulder. While they look a lot better than anything else I tried on, it’s pretty easy to guess I bought them to cover the bulk, not because I so love outfits that drop loosely from the bra line. Those will look a great deal better when they’re less generously filled out.

So. My challenge is to lose 10 pounds by the end of May, and also to firm up the flab.

What’s your challenge?

Return of the Creature!

by

SDXB escapes from the hospital today! They’re tossing him out sometime during the day. Sister-in-Sin is headed back to her normal life—BiS has already slipped out of town. And thank goodness, New Girlfriend has agreed to stay with him for the next month or so.

Yesterday he sounded pretty chipper over the phone. They’d let him walk around outside, which much revived his spirits.

He’s not supposed to be left alone at all for several days. But there’s some hope he’ll recover fairly quickly, all things considered. The Mayo Clinic website says many bypass survivors are driving after about three weeks and frolicking in the sack three to four weeks after the surgery. Apparently it takes about 12 weeks for the bones in your chest to reknit, about three months (uhm…four times three: isn’t that the same as 12 weeks?) for the person to start to regain normal energy levels.

The scary thing about this is that SDXB already does all the things the Mayo describes as “cardiac rehabilitation” strategies. It would be impossible for him to make the lifestyle changes this site recommends, simply because he already lives like that. He cooks all his own food, and it’s very good food—by and large low in fat, high in vegetables and fruits. He rarely puts any salt in the food. He doesn’t drink much any more—certainly not the way he used to—and he quit smoking twenty or thirty years ago. He exercises enthusiastically and with pleasure, every day. And he has few sources of emotional stress.

BiS remarked that an element of genetics comes into play with cardiac disease. His mother did die of cardiac problems, but not until she was in her 80s. You’ve gotta die of something, eh? The aunts and uncles are similarly long-lived. His dad died young of Parkinson’s disease brought on by exposure to chemicals in the cleaning plant where he worked, so we don’t know if he might have developed heart disease later in life—but at least one of the aged uncles is on the father’s side. Consider: this guy is 70 years old and he has relatives in his parents’ generation who are still living.

What will be will be, I guess. Meanwhile, just in case…this old bat is off for a vigorous walk, before the sun comes up.

Update:

So here he is, climbing into his car under the doting care of a pretty young  nurse. He must be lapping it up. SiL sent this picture… This afternoon he sounded almost like his old self and was looking forward to a fifteen-minute walk (at least) around the neighborhood in the cool of the evening.

Solar and rocket stoves: Survival Gear…Frugal Extreme…or Just Going Green?

by

Okay, so Armageddon is here and the power has gone out…permanently. Your shiny glass-topped stove doesn’t work, neither does the oven, and you have to cook all those pizzas in the freezer before they spoil! What’re you gonna do?

That’s easy: whip out the tinfoil and a couple of cardboard boxes, and build yourself a solar oven! Alternatively, you could build an oven that uses sticks of scrap wood for fuel.

This morning a reader commenting on the Weather! post remarked that it’s very easy to construct a solar oven. So of course I had to check that out. A quick Google search brought up this amazing site. By golly, you can build a solar stove that looks like a nun’s headgear turned upside down. You can make one out of an old innertube. You can make a portable stove out of an umbrella. You can make them out of cardboard boxes. You can even use a pizza box. And if you really want to get fancy, you can hook your stove to a kind of battery-run equatorial mount so it will track the sun all day!

Would one of these contraptions save us cheapskates money? It might, if you have an electric stove. The stove and oven are big energy hogs, especially if you cook indoors all the time. My power bill was $57 last month, and I didn’t turn on the heater or an electric space heater once. I rarely leave the lights burning in unattended rooms, and I only do a couple of loads of laundry a week. My stovetop is gas, but the wall oven runs on electricity. So most of the power had to have been used by the oven, the refrigerator, and the computer. Let’s say four appliances consume the lion’s share of the power (this is just a guess!): $57 ÷ 4 = $14.25.

So. You could stand to save as much as $14 a month by cooking everything bakeable in a solar stove.

Green? Well, except for the mining, manufacture, and hauling of aluminum foil and the wood-pulping, manufacture, and distribution entailed in making cardboard boxes, I suppose it’s green. It would be that much less coal mined or oil drilled. I suppose. Though the energy to make those products has got to come from somewhere.

Hey! Every little bit helps! Eh?

So, what could you cook in such a device? A little cruising shows that cooking is plain and time-consuming. Apparently a solar oven is the (relatively) green equivalent of the slow cooker. Cooking times depend on the kind of cooker you’ve built and, of course, the weather. Roasting a single acorn squash will take you four to six hours. Chicken is said to take anywhere from one to three hours. A pan of lasagne takes three hours, but rice (we’re told) can be cooked in half an hour or so—after the water comes to a boil. One enthusiast cooks beans (all day long) and beer bread in his solar oven.

So if you have some food laying around, come Armageddon, you should be OK, assuming you’ve also laid in enough tinfoil.

Scrolling down at the site of our original discovery, we come across something called a rocket stove. This gadget, built of old cans, barrels, bricks or whatnot, is designed to burn small pieces of wood, such as twigs, scraps, or other small pieces of combustible material. These things can be fairly large—here’s one used to cure tobacco—and certainly could be designed, with care, into a nice backyard bread oven.

From what these authors say, apparently a rocket stove can generate some pretty intense heat. A solar oven? Maybe not so much.

On the other hand, given a 118-degree day a solar cooker might get up some pretty fair heat. It’s already in the 90s here. Maybe later this summer I’ll give one of these gadgets a try.

Has anybody built a solar oven or a rocket stove? How did it work for you?

Summertime, and…what am I gonna do, anyway?

by

Only another half-dozen class meetings until the end of the semester. Then a blitz of monster student papers, and then…and then…white-hot silence.

For the first time in many a year, I’m looking at an entire three-month summer break with nothing to do. Even when I was in graduate school and couldn’t take summer classes because they didn’t give enough time to write graduate-level research papers, I had things going on in the summer: research projects, society-wife machinations, trips to Hawaii, West Virginia, Atlanta, England, and waypoints. When I was teaching at the Great Desert University, I usually taught in at least one and sometimes both summer sessions by way of generating a living wage. And of course, over the past five or six years I held a twelve-month administrative position. Though it had normal vacations time, I rarely took any because I had nothing better to do.

So. In the “nothing better to do” department, the question is what on earth am I going to do this summer? Choir ends on May 30, by which time I probably will have both my fall classes set up and ready to go. And in a 115-degree summer, there’s never much going on in Phoenix.

I’m thinking this will be a good opportunity to try to wring a book out of Funny. That’s been on the agenda since shortly after I started the blog. I haven’t done it mostly because I’ve been busy. Mining almost three years’ worth of posts for material that will hang together in a reasonable way will be a big job in itself. With that done, there’ll be the matter of rewriting the stuff to obliterate the blogginess and make it act like print book copy.

Another possibility is to focus on the blog itself and on trying to expand readership. In the past couple of days, Funny has experienced an amazing spike in traffic, apparently because an MSN Money Talks story that mentioned the Great No-Detergent Laundry Experiment was featured on Yahoo.com. The result was huge: in one day, Adsense earned more than it normally does in an entire month.

If daily traffic averaged half that much, 325 days a year, that plus the Social Security plus the normal flow of editorial projects would return my net income to about what I was earning at the Great Desert University. And I’d never have to read another freshman paper again.

It being unlikely that I’d earn that much on a book and certain that book revenues would not stretch out over a period of years, I incline toward spending six to eight hours a day on the blog: writing, marketing, and publicizing. If I actually sat down and organized my time intelligently, three months of that could at least set Funny on the right trajectory.

Or, in the “now for something entirely different” department, I could try to write a genre mystery novel. That’s also an idea that’s been percolating. But I dunno…it’s hard to work up much enthusiasm. I think I’d rather edit them than write them.

Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson. Sidney Paget. Public domain.